How to use Ahrefs for App Store Optimization (ASO)

Did you know that you can use Ahrefs to improve your mobile app rankings, research competitors, and monitor all niches in all countries and languages? How cool is this!

Ahrefs is not only the SEOs favorite tool for website audit, competitor analysis and, keywords and backlinks analysis, but also comes in handy when we talk about all things ASO or app store optimization.

What is App Store Optimization?

App Store Optimization or mobile SEO is the process of optimizing your Google Play or App Store apps to rank higher in the search results page. This is similar to the process of ranking a website on the search engines by improving its title or description to become more visible by knowing how and what users are searching for.

How to optimize an app for stores and which are the most important ranking factors?

1. One of the main app store ranking factors is the app title. Before naming your app, spend some time researching for the keywords that are relevant to you. Also, spend time to research your competitors and analyze the keyword they are ranking for. See which of them get a good amount of traffic and have low competition. Find gaps. 
2. Another important optimization factor is the keywords you are included in your app description (for Google Play) and keywords field (for App Store). The keywords research made initially will help you to figure out which could be the most relevant keywords to your mobile app. 
3. As a secondary factor, we have the total number of downloads. This is correlated to how well optimized is your app and how high is this ranking on the search results page.
4. Ratings and reviews - important, but at the same time difficult to control. Strive to create a good experience for your users. Make it easy to navigate, useful and engaging.

How can you use Ahrefs to optimize your mobile app for stores?

In order to get an overview of the highest-ranking mobile app on Google Play go to Content Explorer > site:play.goolge.com

As you can see on the image below, you'll get the best-performing pages over time, but you can add use filters to get the results you want: app published time, first time published or language.

If you want to see more details about an app, just click on one of them to get more insights. For this demo, we will choose the Facebook app.

Here you can select a time frame (we selected a 6-month period) to get data like: referring domains, referring pages, organic traffic, organic keywords, traffic value or social share.

One of the most important part and the one that can give you insights about the keywords a particular app is ranking for is the Organic Keywords report.

Here you can see the top-performing keywords, search volume, traffic, position, keyword difficulty (KD). Additionally, you can see in which countries the app is ranking and for how many keywords.